More Notes on the Vicar of Wakefield
The novel has a farcical plot: when people think they’re somewhere else they’re really at home. The home and hearth are an incredibly idealized, mythologized place. This is the beginning of the ideology of the domestic.
Vicar is usually thought of as a lightweight, popular tale. Goldsmith typically shows up in discussions of sentimentality.
Theory of moral aerobics: Feeling the sentiment of others strengthens the heart; the problem with this theory is that it doesn’t lead to action. It leads to self-impressed joy at begin such a good person and feeling the suffering of others. It doesn’t lead to any urge to alleviate suffering.
Are we supposed to take Vicar at face value as a Job story? Vicar offers up the same consolation over and over: it’s always God’s will. That’s it, end of story. This consolation gets harder and harder to swallow over the course of the story as we get constant juxtaposition of disaster and consolation.
Olivia and Thornhill end up married: there is something wrong with this. It would have been easy to have Thornhill show some sign of reformation or repentance, but Goldsmith doesn’t give us that.
It’s difficult to take the threats of rape seriously in Joseph Andrews because of its comic tone; however, in Vicar these threats aren’t so comic. The narrative is cumulative, progressive: step by step the family is ruined, one thing after another.
The sin identified chapter-by-chapter is pride, i.e. trying to hold onto a certain station when it is no longer appropriate; putting on airs.
Sir William Thornhill recognizes his fellow aristocrats as corrupt, so he flees the decadent urban life to live with the salt of the earth (in disguise).
The less people have, the better off they are. Wealth is dangerous.
The novel is slightly conservative in the way that it emphasizes paternal love over maternal love. The mother is the cause of many problems, but the father is the shepherd and the leader of his flock, from his family out to his larger group of parishoners.
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